In fair Verona

We have an Epic story for you this week. It involves no Argonauts, but there is a sort of Golden Fleece involved. And the story continues, a long way from its conclusion.

We bring you the story, at least a part of it, of Epic Systems Corp., the innovative health records company with the rigid corporate culture. Under the guidance of founder Judith Faulkner, famous for her reclusive demeanor and unwillingness to engage in the typical big-corporation community niceties, Epic has established a firm grip on the data needs of the medical industry with its patient information systems.

Faulkner established the firm on the west side of Madison in 1979. It resided there until it grew out of its space and, its physical expansion stymied by the city, moved the operation into the fields of neighboring Verona. It has not stopped growing since.

We're living in what we may call the age of big data. You know Money Ball, the tale of how statistical analysis changed the way major league baseball teams evaluated talent and looked at game situations. Since then, all major sports have begun mining the data of their every performance to discover what the combined minutia might reveal.

The massive data cache being gathered by Epic could be the basis for future metadata analyses that will answer as yet unasked questions about certain medical events. At least that's one of the speculative offshoots of gathering all that data. Of course, there would be a lot of questions to answer before such data manipulation could occur, but author Marc Eisen finds plenty of Epic alums who have based their own futures on the prospect. In case you haven't noticed the billboards while walking through the Dane County Airport, Epic spin-offs abound.

Yes, we have an Epic story for you this week -- a long time in coming. But it's not the Epic story. That is still being written.